MT. PELÉE
ERUPTION (1902)

OVERVIEW: The Tropical
Paradise of St. Pierre

The infamous volcano of Mt. Pelée,
shown in this 1987 photo, looms over the village of St. Pierre
on the French Caribbean Island of Martinique. This sleepy little
village shows little of the grandeur of turn-of-the-century St.
Pierre, which was a vibrant colonial city, known to European tourists
as the "Paris of the West Indies." With its red-tiled
cottages, rambling streets, and tropical vegetation, this prosperous
little city was renowned for its beauty. In the official 1894
census, the population of St. Pierre was around 20,000. Although
most were native Martiniquans, the wealth and political power
were controlled largely by Creoles and a few French colonial officials
and civil servants. No one at the time could have predicted the
horror that was to descend on this tropical paradise with the
reawakening of Mt. Pelée in the Spring of 1902.

PARADISE TURNS TO HELL

Although in January
1902 Mt. Pelée began
to show an abrupt increase in fumarole
activity, the public showed little concern. This changed,
however, on April 23 when minor explosions began at the summit
of the volcano. Over the next few days, St. Pierre was rocked
by earth tremors, showered in ash, and enveloped in a thick cloud
of choking sulfurous gas. These nightmarish conditions deteriorated
further when the city and outlying villages were invaded by ground-dwelling
insects and snakes driven from the slopes of Mt. Pelée by the ashfalls and tremors. Horses, pigs, and dogs screamed as red ants and
foot-long centipedes crawled up their legs and bit them. Thousands
of poisonous snakes joined the fray. An estimated 50 humans, mostly
children, died by the snake bites, along with some 200 animals.

As the summit eruptions intensified,
water in the Etang Sec crater lake was heated to near boiling.
On May 5, the crater rim gave way, sending a torrent of scalding
water cascading down the River Blanche. The hot water mixed with
loose pyroclastic debris to generate a massive laharwith a downslope speed of nearly 100 kilometers per hour.
This large volcanic mudflow buried everything in its path. Near
the mouth of the river, north of St. Pierre, it overran a rum
distillery, killing 23 workmen. The lahar continued into the sea,
where it generated a three-meter-high tsunami which flooded the
low-lying areas along the waterfront of St. Pierre.

THE ELECTION

Living near the volcano became
increasingly stressful, leading many to consider leaving St. Pierre
for Martinique's second city, Fort-de-France. On the day of the
lahar, however, Governor Louis Mouttet received a report from
a committee of civic leaders who climbed the volcano to assess
the danger. The only scientist in the group was a local high school
teacher. The report stated that "there is nothing in the
activity of Mt.
Pelée that warrants a departure from St. Pierre." It concluded that "the safety of St. Pierre
is completely assured." The report eased the public's
fears, and gave hope to city officials who were particularly anxious
that voters remain in the city to cast their ballots for an election
that was to be held on May 11. The only people with enough money
to leave the island were the wealthy, nearly all of which belonged
to the Progressive Party of Governor Mouttet. Mouttet convinced
the conservative editor of the daily newspaper Les Colonies
to downplay the danger of the volcano, and to lead the effort
to encourage people to remain. Still, some residents left the
city for Fort-de-France. This prompted Governor Mouttet to send
in troops to patrol the road to Fort-de-France, with orders to
turn back refugees who were trying to leave. Based on the soothing
articles that appeared in Les Colonies, many people in
the countryside flocked to St. Pierre thinking that it was the
safest place to be. The population ballooned to about 28,000,
nearly all of which would perish in the cataclysmic eruption of
May 8.

THE ERUPTION OF MAY 8,
1902

The election scheduled
for May 11 would not take place. The report issued by the investigating
committee on May 5, failed to realize the potential danger of
a large V-shaped notch cut through cliffs surrounding the summit
crater. The notch was like a colossal gun sight pointing directly
at St. Pierre four miles below. At about 7:50 a.m. on May 8, the
volcano erupted with a deafening roar. A large black cloud composed
of superheated gas, ash and rock rolled headlong down the south
flank of Mt. Pelée at more than 100 miles per hour, its
path directed by the V-shaped notch at the summit. In less than
one minute it struck St. Pierre with hurricane force. The blast
was powerful enough to carry a three-ton statue sixteen meters
from its mount. One-meter-thick masonary walls were blown into
rubble and support girders were mangled into twisted strands of
metal. The searing heat of the cloud ignited huge bonfires. Thousands
of barrels of rum stored in the city's warehouses exploded, sending
rivers of the flaming liquid through the streets and into the
sea. The cloud continued to advanced over the harbor where it
destroyed at least twenty ships anchored offshore. The hurricane
force of the blast capsized the steamship Grappler, and
its scorching heat set ablaze the American sailing ship Roraima,
killing most of her passengers and crew. The Roraima had
the misfortune of arriving only a few hours before the eruption.
Those on on board could only watch in horror as the cloud descended
on them after annihilating the city of St. Pierre. Of the ~28,000
people in St. Pierre, there were only two known survivors.

The remains
of St. Pierre

Nuée
Ardente from Mt. Pelée

The dynamic cloud
of hot gases and incandescent solid particles that destroyed St.
Pierre was a pyroclastic
flow,
a feature that was unknown to science at the time. Subsequent
examples observed on Mt. Pelée were described by French
volcanologists as nuée
ardentes,
or glowing clouds.

THE SURVIVORS

Although there
were only two survivors in St. Pierre, there were other survivors
on the outskirts of the town and in some of the ships moored in
the harbor. Mercifully, death came quickly to those that perished.
Some may have died by the sheer force of the blast, but most died
within a few seconds after inhaling the scorching fumes and ash
of the pyroclastic flow. The throats and lungs of most of the
deceased were seared and their bodies badly burned.

The tales of the
two male survivors of St. Pierre are described briefly here, as
well as the astonishing story of a young girl who looked straight
into the mouth of a volcanic vent just before Mt. Pelée
began to erupt.

THE SHOEMAKER

A young shoemaker,
Léon Compere-Léandre, was sitting on his doorstep
when the nuée ardente hit. Although he was severely
burnt he survived, partly because of his good health, but also
because his house was near the edge of the pyroclastic flow. Here
is his experience, in his own words:

"I felt a terrible wind
blowing, the earth began to tremble, and the sky suddenly became
dark. I turned to go into the house, with great difficultuy climbed
the three or four steps that separated me from my room, and felt
my arms and legs burning, also my body. I dropped upon a table.
At this moment four others sought refuge in my room, crying and
writhing with pain, although their garmets showed no sign of
having been touched by flame. At the end of 10 minutes one of
these, the young Delavaud girl, aged about 10 years, fell dead;
the others left. I got up and went to another room, where I found
the father Delavaud, still clothed and lying on the bed, dead.
He was purple and inflated, but the clothing was intact. Crazed
and almost overcome, I threw myself on a bed, inert and awaiting
death. My senses returned to me in perhaps an hour, when I beheld
the roof burning. With sufficient strength left, my legs bleeding
and covered with burns, I ran to Fonds-Sait-Denis, six kilometers
from St. Pierre."

THE CONVICTED FELON

The only other known survivor in St. Pierre
became a minor celebrity. He was a husky 25-year-old roustabout
named Louis-Auguste Cyparis, locally known simply as "Samson".
In early April, Samson was put in jail for wounding one of his
friends with a cutlass. Towards the end of his sentence, he escaped
from a labouring job in town, danced all night, and then turned
himself into the authorities the following morning. For this,
he was sentenced to solitary confinement for a week in the prison's
dungeon. On May 8, he was alone in his dungeon with only a small
grated opening cut into the wall above the door. While waiting
for his breakfast, his cell became dark and he was overcome by
intense gusts of hot air mixed with ash that had entered through
the grated opening. He held his breathe while experiencing intense
pain. After a few moments, the heat subsided. He was severally
burned, but managed to survive for four days before he was rescued
by people exploring the ruins of St. Pierre. After he recovered,
he received a pardon and eventually joined the Barnum & Bailey
Circus, where he toured the world billed as the "Lone Survivor
of St. Pierre."

THE LITTLE GIRL

One of the most
incredible escapes from Mt. Pelée was that of a young girl
named Havivra Da Ifrile. Very early in the morning of May 8, Havivra
was on her way to services at the catherdral in St. Pierre when
her mother sent her on an errand. She was to walk to her aunt's
pastry shop near a local tourist attraction known as the Corkscrew.
The "Corkscrew" was named after a tourist trail
that wound down into an ancient crater, or parasitic
cone,
located halfway up the flank of the volcano. As Havivra approached
the Corkscrew, she noticed smoke rising from the crater. After
looking into the crater, she described it in this manner: "There
I saw the bottom of the pit all red, like boiling, with little
blue flames coming from it." She apparently saw three
people trying to run up the Corkscrew before they were engulfed
in ". . . a puff of blue smoke . . " and ".
. . fell as if killed." She fled toward St. Pierre.

"Just as
I got to the main street I saw this boiling stuff burst from
the top of the Corkscrew and run down the side of the hill. It
followed the road first, but then as the stream got bigger, it
ate up the houses on both sides of the road. Then I saw that
a boiling red river was coming from another part of the hill
and cuttung off the escape of the people who were running from
their houses."

Frightened, Havivra
ran to the shore and jumped into her brother's small boat and
headed along the shore to a cave that she used to play pirate
in with her friends.

"But before
I got there I looked back -- and the whole side of the mountain
which was near the town seemed to open and boil down on the screaming
people. I was burned a good deal by the stones and ashes that
came flying about the boat, but I got to the cave."

While in the safety
of the cave, she heard a hissing sound as the hot pyroclastic
debris entered the water. The last thing she remembered before
lapsing into unconsciousness was the water rising rapidly toward
the roof of the cave. She was later found by the French cruiser
Suchet drifting two miles out to sea in her charred and
broken boat.

THE MAGNIFICENT TOWER OF
PELÉE

In October of that year,
a lava
dome
began to rise out of the crater floor. It grew for a solid year
into a gigantic shaft in the form of an obelisk. It has been described
by many as the most spectacular lava dome produced in historic
times. It was 350 to 500 feet thick at its base and it soared
to over 1000 feet above the base of the crater floor. It sometimes
rose at a remarkable rate, up to 50 ft/day. The huge spine of
lava became known as the "Tower of Pelée."
At night the sides of this magnificent monolith was marked by
traces of red incandescent cracks from the still hot lava in its
interior.

At its maximum
size, the Tower of Pelée was twice the height of
the Washington Monument and equal in volume to the Great Pyramid
(Cheops) of Egypt. It finally became unstable and collapsed into
a pile of rubble in March 1903, after 11 months of growth. No
geologist had ever witnessed the emergence of such an object before.